Fridmarr wrote:Is that directed at me? I'm not paranoid about immunizations. I was in the military so I've had my fair share of vaccinations...

That said, those analogies are all terrible. First, you could totally flip all of them right back at you and your "paranoia" about people who aren't immunized. But more importantly, people are doing those actions because the reward that they are getting from those activities is of greater value to them than their concern over the risks. That reward value though is not itself risk based.

Immunization is purely a risk scenario, you get the shot to reduce the risk of getting a disease, or you don't get the shot to reduce the risk of not suffering side effects from the shot. It's a straight risk tradeoff. That's a completely independent and different scenario than your analogies.

The "paranoia" was caused when scientists published accepted research which said that an immunization wasn't as safe as it should be, linked it to a disease, and said that it should be pulled from the market for further analysis.

I'm not paranoid about people who aren't immunized; I am pissed off at people who don't get their children vaccinated, because their little petri dishes pass along their diseases to my vaccinated child.

The "paranoia" was caused when a scientist deliberately falsified test results to suggest a link that he couldn't prove otherwise. Idiots and conspiracy freaks now use that research to "prove" that vaccinations are potentially dangerous as an excuse so they don't have to take their kids to the doctor for some jabs because it's inconvenient for them, and because the responsible people out there do most of the work for them by creating herd immunity, and because maybe they are afraid of needles themselves and project that to their children.

Any injection can possibly be dangerous. Simply going to the doctor's office potentially exposes you to illness. But there are so many more dangerous activities that people pursue several times every day without even thinking about them that the idea of avoiding vaccination due to potential harm is absurd.

Yes but that research persisted for a long time. I expect vaccination rates will now increase as that has been settled.

The value of playing a sport is fun. If people stop having fun they stop playing. The value of an immunization is lowered risk of disease, if they feel that it actually increases risk of disease it would be dumb to get it. It doesn't matter how risky other behavior is.

...this is silly. I just do not care how much you value that data point. It quite obviously is not the entire reason this discussion exists. This conversation exists because vaccinations have a non 100% effectiveness, they have a non 0% risk, and there is a non 0% exposure chance (the latter being the data point in question). If vaccinations were 100% effective and had zero risk, exposure rate wouldn't matter, everyone would choose the vaccine. It's a data point... Call it the most important thing in the world if you want, I just do not care and most importantly it makes no difference to this discussion.

The person making the decision is concerned about the exposure risk, but not the system. The system could just as easily be a heavily mandated quarantine system, but at the end of the day it just results in a risk.

If vaccinations were 100% effective and had zero risk, exposure rate would still matter. After all, exposure rate drives the need and cost to produce, supply and effectively apply vaccinations to begin with, and people DO care about that. Plus, even with a "zero risk" vaccine, you have a "non-zero risk" process simply due to human error.

The value of an immunization is lowered risk of disease, if they feel that it actually increases risk of disease it would be dumb to get it.

No, the value of an immunization is not simplified to "risk of disease", it's a compound of "risk/magnitude".The value is also a long-term effect beyond your child to your grandchild and so on, in the case of diseases that aren't like the flu where new strains develop so fast that there's no realistic hope for the disease to be eradicated.

At issue was the constitutionality of Section 5 of the 1965 law, which requires state and local governments with a history of racial discrimination to pre-clear any changes to their voting laws with the Justice Department prior to enacting them.

Congress has renewed the law four times, most recently in 2006 for a period of 25 years. The margin of victory was 99-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House.

Scalia attributed the repeated renewal of Section 5 to a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” He said, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”

.....

The core struggle in the case is between the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment, which tasks Congress with enforcing a ban on discriminatory voting laws.

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, any state or local government that used to have a history of racial discrimination can't pass new voting laws unless pre-screened by the Justice Department. Who determines what governments fall under this purview? Has the JD had to take action on any purposed legislation in the last three decades? Is there anything in this legislation that doesn't fall under the 15th anyway?

If this legislation were removed, is the danger that these state and local governments would suddenly impose racist laws that would survive a legal challenge? I can see oversight being required in 1965. Nowadays, I'm willing to bet someone, somewhere had a cushy job rubber stamping legislation because of this law.

Are Scalia's characterization of this Section as a "perpetuation of racial entitlement" fair, or unfair? Is his quoted statement about the removal of racial entitlements true or false?

I'm not seeing much in this particular article that paints Scalia as a douchecanoe, even if it is from TPM.

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, any state or local government that used to have a history of racial discrimination can't pass new voting laws unless pre-screened by the Justice Department. Who determines what governments fall under this purview? Has the JD had to take action on any purposed legislation in the last three decades? Is there anything in this legislation that doesn't fall under the 15th anyway?

If this legislation were removed, is the danger that these state and local governments would suddenly impose racist laws that would survive a legal challenge? I can see oversight being required in 1965. Nowadays, I'm willing to bet someone, somewhere had a cushy job rubber stamping legislation because of this law.

"It was last extended in 2006, and required Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia; and parts of California, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and South Dakota to obtain preclearance before changing voting laws.

Jurisdictions that can prove voting discrimination has been absent for the past 10 years can "bail out" of Section 5, and be exempt from requiring federal approval of voting procedural changes."

There's a few stuff all over about Florida and Texas in 2012 and this thing, and there was an article I read earlier today that actually had a number count for the rejections from the VRA, but I don't remember where it was since it's not on my work computer's history.

“Some portions of the South have changed,” said Sotomayor, who then cited an ongoing pattern of discriminatory voting procedures in Shelby County. “Your county pretty much hasn’t. You may be the wrong party in bringing this.”

Rein argued that applying Section 5 of the law to only certain states violates the Constitution, which is based on laws being applied equally. He said that the formula to determine which jurisdictions fall under Section 5 is outdated, based on long-since discontinued literacy tests and voting registration dependent on mid-1960s data.

At the center of the case is whether the courts or Congress, which in 2006 reauthorized the Voting Rights Act for 25 years, should decide whether the prior approval requirement in Section 5 – considered by supporters to be a deterrent to discrimination – stays in place.

U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli pointed out that Congress had looked at the record and approved the law by large margins. But Justice Antonin Scalia said, “I think it is attributable to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

Presumably, if they try something, it has to go through the approval process under Section 5, and the opponents can convince whoever does the approving that it unfairly targets minorities, or they do something that does affect minorities in some way, e.g. early voting hours, districting, not providing translations in X language, getting dates wrong in the translation to X language, etc.

Fridmarr wrote:It's a disgruntled liberal, complaining that Obama has been too conservative (or given in too much to the GOP).

The first one. Remember that political chart we had some pages ago? Obama places in the upper right corner. It's not that he hasn't given in to the GOP, but simply the politics of the US today are so far right of where it was just twenty years ago.

But most court-watchers emerged from the oral arguments believing the portion of the Voting Rights Act that singles out states and counties with a history of racial discrimination at the polls—most of them in the South—will be struck down. Discriminating against minority voters would still be illegal under the act, but people who hope to challenge discriminatory actions would have to do so through the regular court process, which takes longer than the special pathway set up under the law.

Yeah, I don't get it either. Scalia's arguing that the discriminatory sections of the law should be removed as they create a racial entitlement, it looks like the court agrees. Voting Rights still protected under the 14th and 15th ... so what's the rub, bub?

Yeah, I don't get it either. Scalia's arguing that the discriminatory sections of the law should be removed as they create a racial entitlement, it looks like the court agrees. Voting Rights still protected under the 14th and 15th ... so what's the rub, bub?

One of the reasons people seem to be in a rub for the most part:- So take the recent one, Florida wanted to do some stuff with early voting hours. It got blocked before it went into play because of this, a lot of fuss happened, but ultimately nothing changed.- Put "Florida on an equal footing", and the early voting hours get changed, the people who previously blocked it go through a slower court system, where it might or might not actually get brought up/fixed before the election actually happens, and even if it does, might create enough confusion to achieve the effect of disrupting early voting hours anyway.

And of course, there's other people annoyed over the idea that protecting people's "right to vote" is a racial entitlement when it's basically accepted as something all citizens are entitled to, this step is just targetted at counties which have a history of specifically acting to curb that "right to vote" regarding a subset of the population. I don't know that the court actually agrees with the viewpoint either way.

Course, when you go the other aspect, Scalia's questioning is based on fairly odd logic. While it is possibly true that people may be continuing to vote for extending this law based on the idea that it would be political suicide not to, he's backing that up by comparing how racism is on a downward trend but support for this keeps increasing. The two aren't actually related in that way - racism can be on a downward trend and this have increased support simply because the people in Congress today are not the same people who had to be fought against for this kind of law to go into effect, and a greater awareness of racism in general.

Darielle wrote:And of course, there's other people annoyed over the idea that protecting people's "right to vote" is a racial entitlement

Do you have a quote where Scalia actually said that the right to vote was a racial entitlement? The first article Klaud linked constrained his racial entitlement comment to Section 5. Indeed Justice Sotomayor's supposed rebuke of Scalia's comments directly referenced Section 5.

The second article suggests that Scalia did say it was a racial entitlement by actually quoting someone else who made a comment as a direct retort of that notion. It also claims that Sotomayor's rebuke was about "the right to vote" but it doesn't actually show her quote. While the quote in the first article indicates that she specifically said "Section 5".

I haven't researched it so maybe there are some quotes I'm missing, but it doesn't look like to me he said that, or anything that a reasonable person could assume meant that.

It does a reasonable job of explaining what sequestration is...but beyond that there is a heavy dose of rhetoric which is pretty questionable.

Some of that goes back to Fuzzy's so far ignored post about Bob Woodward, who ran an Op-Ed piece indicating how sequestration was an administration plan...and claims that he has since been "threatened" by the White House.